News

More information from around the web, here we go!

I started the day off by talking in the The VMworld Underground Podcast VMworld Europe 2009 – Wednesday Update

http://www.vmworldunderground.com/forum/topics/wednesday-vmworld-europe-2009

We talked about the following, this was the agenda.

“

1. VDC-OS – I get it now, and I can evangelize the benefits. I know, I’m slow. 🙂

a. vNetwork, vStorage, vNetwork

1b. vCloud

1c. vClient

2. Performance Cute VMs vs a Sun Sparc cluster circa 2002 – Scale out and Scale up efforts from VMware. Why don’t they use SSD drives in these newer benchmarks??!!

3 Citrix subbing Xen for Hyper-V – Citrix replacing Xen with Hyper-V by VMworld San Fran 09′?? Theron Conrey, thinks so and his arguments seem sound to me, a simple unfrozen caveman vExpert.

4. vExpert ?

”

Thanks to http://twitter.com/vseanclark@ http://www.vmworldunderground.com

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http://www.yellow-bricks.com has a write up that shows the mood, titled : VMworld day 2 – Random stuff and Data recovery

“

What a day again, and it’s actually not finished cause within a couple of minutes the VMworld Europe 2009 party will start.

The VMTN Experts session was actually, in my opinion, pretty good today. We had way more people coming over that were asking questions or just came over to have a chat with one of the Experts! With the vExperts being announced this morning there was a good atmosphere, even Statler and Waldorf euuuh Boche and Laverick were having fun. For those on twitter and those who have been following the story about VMDougs snuggie, check the video Gabe published, lol.

“

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http://vinf.net/ has a article VMworld Europe Day 2: Keynote that does a great job summing up what went on.

“

vSphere

There were some examples of Oracle OLTP application scaling that have been done in vSphere;

• <15% overhead on 8 way vCPU VM
• 24k DB transactions/sec

vStorage – extensible via API, storage vendors write their own thin provisioning or snapshot interfaces that hook into VMware.

vNetwork – Distributed vSwitch maintains network state in vMotion

vSphere = scale, 64TB RAM in cluster

Power thrifty (CPU power management features)

vShield zones follows vm around DRS – DMZ for groups of VMs (demos tomorrow + breakout)

vCenter HA improvements with VC heartbeat, today 60% of people running VC on physical box to isolate management tools from the execution platform, this delivers high availability for them.

vCenter Server heartbeat which provide an Active/passive cluster solution (but not using MSCS) and configuration change replication/rollback; works over WAN or LAN – IP based with floating IP address, efficient WAN transfers.

Monitors/provides HA for the following components;

• vCenter database
• Licencing server
• Upgrade manager

vCenter Scalability; 50% increase in capacity with 3k vms and 300 hosts per vCenter, in addition the VI client can now aggregate up to 10 vCenter servers in a single UI, with search functionality, can report/search.

vCloud

In terms of vCloud, the federation and long-distance vMotion sound a bit like science fiction – but there was the same opinion of vMotion when it was first announced – look at it now, VMware know how to do this stuff

Long-distance vMotion is the eventual goal but there are some challenges to overcome in engineering a reliable solution, but in the meantime SRM can deliver a similar sort of overall service, automating DR failover with array based replication and an electronic, scripted run-book.

long-distance vMotion has some other interesting usecases, enabling a follow the sun model for support and IT services – I’ve written about this previouslyhere – this is a great goal and I would expand this suggestion to include follow the power, where you choose to move services around globally to take advantage of the most cost-efficient power, local support etc.

VMWare building an extensible and customisable portal for cloud providers based on Lab Manager which is likley to be bundled as a product.

The vCenter vCloud plug-in was demoed, this was more advanced that I had anticipated, with the target scenario being you can use one VI client to manage services across multiple clouds.

Virtual Desktop

this is another key initiative and focus of investment within VMware, building up the VDI offering(s) and providing centralised desktops as well as offline/distributed scenarios in future via the Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) – some of my more off the wall thoughts on that here

Key points;

• Central management
• Online/offline scenarios
• Linked clone
• Thick client push full VM down to machine
• Patching is challenge – master disk + linked clones
• Thin-app; makes patching/swapping out underlying OS easier as apps are in a “bubble”.
• Leveraging ACE server; lock USB etc.
• CVP – client checks back to central policy server (polling)
• allows for self-destruct or leased virtual desktop, can’t run away with apps/data

VMware are making heavy investment in PCoIP- providing 3d graphics online offline for high-demand apps (video/graphics) Jerry Chan demoed some of the PCoIP solutions they are working to using Google Earth, whilst impressive – Brian Madden has covered these in more detail here but I did notice that Steve said vClient which is the 1st time I have heard that name.

Finally, there was some coverage of the mobile phone VM platform, which whilst I see what they are aiming for and the advantages of it to a Telco (single platform to test apps against), it’s personally of less interest to me. I do hope that VMware don’t go all Microsoft and start spreading themselves into every market just because they can need to have a presence (live search, live everything etc), rather than focusing on good, core products. Whilst they are the 1st people I’ve heard of seriously working on this I don’t know how it will pan out – but will keep an open mind, I suppose a sandboxed, secured corporate phone build with a VoIP app, some heavy crypto and a 3G connection controlled under a hypervisor could be appealing to certain types of govt. “organisations”.

All in, a very good keynote session – much better focused at the main demographic of the conference and there are some good sessions scheduled for today.

“

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http://www.thevirtualblackhole.com has their thoughts here.

http://www.thevirtualblackhole.com/virtual-tech/vmworld-europe-2009-day-two

“

It is day two at VMworld Europe 2009 and it has been an amazing event it has been so far. Once of the coolest things I saw and learned about was the Mobile Virtualization Platform or MVP. There was a demo of two virtual machines running on a Nokia N800. This was really cool to see the demo and hear about the technology. I have two cell phones, one personal and one business. I like to be able to separate my personal life from my professional life. This technology would allow me to have both phones running isolated and independently on a single device. Too cool!! I wonder how long it will be before we can start doing M2V or mobile to virtual?

“

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http://technodrone.blogspot.com posted on the New Maximums for vSphere

“

Announced by Steve Herrod today on stage in Cannes today:

• 8 virtual CPUs
• 256GB per VM
• 40 GB/s network throughput
• up to 64 nodes per cluster
• up to 4096 cores to manage
• full support for Distributed Power Management (DPM), which saves 50% Watts consumption during VMwark benchmarks

“

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And from VMworld.com the Wednesday keynote.

Wednesday, February 25 (9:00am -10:30am CET) Dr. Stephen Herrod, CTO and Sr. VP of R&D of VMware

Off for some more reading, enjoy all!

EDIT: some good info here as well, please check out http://blog.baeke.info/blog/_archives/2009/2/25/4104570.html

Since I was not able to attend the VMworld Europe 2009 conference this year, I am obtaining information from a far.  Here are the bits and pieces of information I have been able to obtain so far, mostly blog’s from people at the conference.

Jason Boche has a Blog entry on Tuesday keynote.

VMworld Europe 2009 Tuesday keynote

“

The general session keynote was kicked off by Maurizio Carli, General Manager EMEA. Maurizio briefly talked about VMware EMEA growth:

• VMworld Europe 2008 4,500 attendees
• VMworld Europe 2009 4,700 attendees
• 100 sponsors this year

Paul Maritz President and CEO began his keynote discussing today’s IT problems and how they are not sustainable into the future. The solution is:

• Efficiency
• Control
• Choice

VMware addresses the above with the following initiatives:

1. VDC-OS – Foundation for the Cloud
2. vCloud – Choice and Cloud Federation
3. vClient – Desktop as a Service

”

He also over views the following

VDC-OS

vCloud

vClient

Please check out his full bog post. http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2009/02/24/vmworld-europe-2009-tuesday-keynote/

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http://www.thevirtualblackhole.com/ has a write titled : VMworld Announcements Day One

“

Today was the official start of VMworld 2009 in Cannes, France.  Yesterday was partner day but today was the official start of the event. Today’s big announcement is as follows…

vSphere, is the term to define the “next generation” virtualization platform.

VDC-OS will ship in 2009 and will help in the adoption of the cloud infrastructure.

vShield Zones in VMware Clusters which will help control security with a mix of security type virtual machines via a virtual appliance.

CVP is the name for VMware’s bare metal desktop hypervisor when working with VMware View

VMware and Neverfail working in collaboration have developed vCenter Server Heartbeat which will give VirtualCenter the ability to fail over to a standby cluster and remove the need to run VirtualCenter in a Microsoft Clustering configuration.

VMware working in collaboration with Fujitsu Siemens have developed Flexframe for SAP to allow the virtualization of SAP

“

Full source post http://www.thevirtualblackhole.com/virtual-tech/vmworld-announcements-day-one

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http://www.earthtimes.org posted about Vizioncore, in this article.

Vizioncore Pulls The Covers Off Virtualization Management Roadmap at VMworld Europe 2009

“

CANNES, France – (Business Wire)VMworld Europe 2009 – Vizioncore Inc., the market leader in server virtualization management, today provided visitors to VMworld Europe 2009 with a preview of its latest virtual machine (VM) automation console, vControl, and demonstrations of Vizioncore’s complete product set including a preview of the next generation of Vizioncore vRanger Pro, code-named project Woodstock. Also on show is the recently announced vFoglight Pro and further details around the brand new Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (VESI), a community driven development program sponsored by Vizioncore. Visit Vizioncore at Booth 106, between February 24-26 to see its full range of products on display.

“

They outline each product in the article.

Full source post http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/vizioncore-pulls-the-covers-off,726555.shtml

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http://vmblog.com/ has a blog post titled :

Brocade Showcases Unified Management and End-to-End Data Center Virtualization Solutions at VMworld Europe 2009

“

Brocade today announced that it will be participating at VMworld Europe 2009 with a host of virtualization-related topics and technology innovations, including a Brocade customer speaking session on virtualization best practices, a preview demonstration of unified management capabilities for next-generation data centers and a reference architecture paper demonstrating the ease and scalability of mixed virtual workloads running on Brocade storage area networks (SANs).

Further showcasing virtualization innovations, Brocade will host a live in-booth preview of the Brocade Management Plugin for managing VMware virtualized environments. This demonstration will showcase the potential of a new level of unified management that offers expanded visibility and automated management of a virtualized infrastructure beyond the confines of server networks and into shared storage.

Finally, Brocade will unveil a reference architecture paper that will help system administrators better design and implement VMware ESX 3.5 virtual servers on high-performance Brocade Fibre Channel SANs. This reference architecture can be used as a “toolkit” by providing additional tuning and setup guides for administrators installing VMware for the first time or optimizing an existing VMware environment.

“

They follow up with more on the subject.

Full Source Post http://vmblog.com/archive/2009/02/24/brocade-showcases-unified-management-and-end-to-end-data-center-virtualization-solutions-at-vmworld-europe-2009.aspx

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http://vmetc.com/ has a blog post titled : VMworld Europe 2009 Day 1 News: VDC-OS Private Clouds, CVP Client Hypervisor, vCenter Heartbeat, vShield Zones, and Virtualized SAP

Here is their take on what has been announced.

“

• VMware has confirmed that the VDC-OS initiative will ship in 2009 and foster the adoption of internal, private cloud infrastructure. VMware envisions this shift in infrastructure to include the desktop with technologies that provide the vClient initiative. I am hoping to hear a clearer message about the VDC-OS / vSphere / ESX naming of initiatives / technology layers / products, but news provided today does not seem to offer any additional clarity.
• VMware has a bare metal desktop hypervisor and it’s name is CVP. Working with VMware View, CVP will allow users to work offline and be managed centrally by VDI administrators.
• VMware and Neverfail have developed a high availability solution for VirtualCenter (VC) in the form of an active / passive host based cluster named VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat. This solution appears to be primarily designed for VC to fail over to a standby server on the LAN, but apparently a WAN configuration is also available. Previously, virtual administrators would have to rely on MSCS Clustering solutions to provide high availability for physical instances of VC.
• The introduction of VMware vShield Zones in ESX Clusters will allow for a more efficient mix of virtual machines without compromising security. VI design in the past has presented challenges when considering how to isolate VMs in the DMZ from VMs in production for example, and this has lead to the creation of additional ESX hosts and Clusters to insure isolation and prevent system compromise. Now with the vShield Zones virtual appliance, different security policies can be created and enforced even as guests migrate between ESX hosts thus allowing the consolidation of ESX hosts and VMs.
• Fujitsu Siemens Computers and VMware have announced Flexframe for SAP which allows companies to virtualize SAP. Flexframe is a solution that provides guaranteed resources for the best end user experience under dynamically changing conditions.

“

Full source post : http://vmetc.com/2009/02/24/vmworld-europe-2009-day-1-news-vdc-os-private-clouds-cvp-client-hypervisor-vcenter-heartbeat-vshield-zones-and-virtualized-sap/

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Vmworld has released the following

Expand Networks press kit

and Novell Announces Broad Collaboration with VMware to Build SUSE Linux Enterprise Appliances on VMware ESX

Keynote Tuesday, February 24 Paul Maritz, President and CEO of VMware

all from VMworld.com

That is all for now, I will keep you updated as I find more information.